Tag Archives: perspective

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Magellanism

authentic artistic productions
the avant garde…
whisper unconscious koens
subliminal social suggestions
haunting the ready, the restless…
prepares ground
for punctuated emergence

what is this light ???
a cascading series
of erotic creative toggles
which vitalize the preparation
of this special autopoesis
the poetry of our collective dance
becomes obvious
in these special glimpses
of the great remembering

it’s more than the eros
of pursuing the excellent questions,
the loving play and design
of cognitive gifts and exercise…
it’s more than the sacred reverence
of our sanga in practice,
this emergent suchness,
exhibiting delicious blended elements
of both…
ah !!

at this intersection of our experience
a fresh, new, and alive we-ness emerges
mysterious, gorgeous, seductive presentations
the stuff of this new manifestation
the resonance of our fresh social moment
this precious group
this shared new luminance
new containers are formed
already brimming,
with our splendid light

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PAL.Chapter 16. Morality and Suicide. pp431-455.

 

The progression in evolution and social development is from genus to species, whole to part, community to individual. Dependency is prior to separation. The individual becomes autonomous through a process of individuation. … Rationality may well be the enemy of sympathetic feeling even as it justifies compassion.

Since moral conduct reflects character independent of the virtues or vices of those to whom it is directed, and irrespective of the breadth of its objects, it is arguable what amount or quality of sacrifice should count as being altruistic or masochistic.

The being-conscious of the merit of the act, whether the merit is real or imagined, deprives it of some integrity. Is a selfish value hiding in the most unselfish motive? Should the saint or mystic not desire union with god, salvation, liberation? It is said that the bodhisattva must even surrender the desire for nirvana.

Altruism and suicide are anomalies that are fundamental to human nature. They are important because they reflect the extinction of self-interest in despair, or the sacrifice of one’s self for others or for futurity. Yet, inevitably, it is the mix of values in the self that guides the action.

There would seem to be few examples of ethical dilemmas posed by the happiness of a solitary person. Yet a hermit in his cave, however blissful, could justly be accused of indifference to others or lack of compassion as a negative moral defect.

… a life or death needs a justification, which is the meaning we give to what we have accomplished or become, or what we are prepared to relinquish. Most every life has a crisis at a certain point, but there is also a continuous need to justify, to renew and rededicate.

A justification – for living or dying – may be an excuse, but without reasons or justifications there are no considered acts.

Life’s gloomy companion, death, like an ever present spouse, often ignored, now and then insistent, a sullen background that weakens and enriches, darkens and vivifies, but always intensifies the drab palette of everyday life.

From the perspective of the present the past is a physiological limit on possibility, though layers of the past may anchor a justification for purpose in the future.

Since only the present exists, the duration of a life is not of great metaphysical import.

In fact, the length of a life is the feeling of its duration, not the chronology it consumes. The feeling is like a mood with indistinct limits and contents. A moos is punctuated by feelings. But a mood is not a collection of the feelings into which it disperses, as a duration is not a boxcar of moments in a process of summation.

The future in any event never did exist, it just became the past in the pressure of a becoming-to-actuality as an aim to self-realisation. To live in the past or present is to live at an early or final segment in the mind/brain state. Early segments elaborate memory and pastness, final ones perception and the present.

Moral actions are relational. We kill living things to survive or protect ourselves. To kill them without good reason is immoral or, depending on their degree of mentality – from prion to primate – ecologically unsound, which may also be immoral.

To grow older, nearer to death, is to cede one’s will to a greater power as if careening into the path of a powerful magnet.

The search for the sources of creative energy in layers beneath the conscious life, the recognition that meaning and purpose are not in the world waiting to be discovered but are generated in a process of self-creation, are the beginnings of true individuality.

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Chapter 12. The Ideal. pp.335-358

 

The notion of completion comes from the possibility of realising the ideal. If one could, in principle, see an artwork of perfect beauty or an act of perfect goodness, one could say, “There, that is a manifestation of the ideal.”

On possible source of the ideal is the evolutionary thrust of will. But positing the will as the engine of the world and the urge to actuality does not explain a striving to betterment that is linked to renewal and rebirth.

The ideal is not achievable because the final event that either shatters the perfection of the ideal, attempts to fulfill another ideal, or abandons the path of idealisation. Process does not end in ideal categories, it begins with them and ends with involution, the cessation of prior nature and the assumption of novel form.

With the ideal, it comes down to a desire for that which is the opposite of the most critical features of life, that is, for absolute spirituality or divinity and an unchanging, imperishable, timeless unity. These characteristics of the ideal are all linked to the idea of perfection, while the idea of perfection or the existence of perfection is linked to that of deity (Hartsthorne, 1962). If perfection goes out the window, as it should, the ideal, which is an aim without a paradigm, goes with it.

Life proliferates into every conceivable niche, until mind itself becomes the adaptive ground of change. There is evolutionary pressure towards increasing intelligence, and this may be a sufficient explanation for the evolution of more complex organisms, but random variation leaves out the lawfulness or regularity of the process through which advance occurs.

Metaphysical though attempts to resolve human conception with physical nature. Yet all categories, whether historical or spontaneous, by virtue of being categories, i.e. having generic properties without a specific content, are subjective, immutable and timeless. It is the nature of a category that it is described in such a way. So long as the category does not individuate it retains properties of the ideal.

This tendency to betterment is the natural bias of process. It could account for the evolution of forms that create environments for novel adaptations. But the tendency need not be reified to a goal.

The presence of the earlier in the later, even in the most basic entities, where what comes before is part of what comes after, can be construed as a kind of memory. Similarly, but more clearly the basis of memory, unconscious configurations in the mental state are conveyed into conscious conception.

The becoming of a thing, its life force, is a change over some duration. However, until a cycle of change terminates to reproduce a moment in the existence of the thing, the thing does not yet exist and is non-temporal. The completion of the becoming gives the thing its being.

As the font of the actual, the category is asked to do the impossible, namely, deliver a temporal existent out of a timeless non-existent, or shift from being to becoming, or create something out of nothing. But this is a transition from simultaneity to succession, the transition laying down the time series.

The many events in consciousness appear to change at different rates, and this is a problem for an association of time with change. However the change that matters is the laying down of the temporal order of mind/brain states, in which the multiplicity of events in consciousness are all partitions of the one event of the conscious state.

The ideal satisfies less an objective standard than an artistic potential.

A mark of genius is that even when the ideal is fully probed we feel the mystery of untapped possibility in wonder or profundity,

As the purely objective runs up against the totality of mind, the purely subjective in encumbered with facts in need of explanation. Yet a focus on objects is not the same as an objective focus. Subjectivity is ubiquitous. We live in mentality. Objects are the final reach of the subjective.

Categories can be interpreted in terms of prototypes, cores or ‘essences’ or, what might amount to the same thing, the average of the properties of related particulars. The prototype is a sample in the category that prioritises representative features.

… the core features of a category are what survive after the unique ones are canceled by overlapping perspectives. The core features that are common to all members constitute the essence of the category. The category expands ‘upwards’ or ‘downwards’, and can arise spontaneously.

The core self is also beneath introspective access. Once an ‘I’ individuates, the background is lost. The ‘I’ takes on direction, orientation, a disposition or bias to action, belief and value. The direction is the momentary person that issues from the core. The core is part of the archetypal world, the ‘I’, the world of prototypes.

(emphasis mine)

Only rarely in life or in art does one feel that an act, all at once or over time, satisfies its intuitive wholeness.

The essential character of the self is not immune to extreme circumstance, stress, hypnosis, brain damage, and so on. The self does not survive a loss of its objects. The self, merely to exist, must specify a world. The world collapses if the self fails to individuate. Conversely, for the world to exist requires a self at its foundation. Put simply, the world disappears if it is split off from the self, and the self dissolves if it is cut off from the world.

Mind is self-conscious nature, or nature in an act of self-perception.

From the standpoint of nature, the multiplicity of selves creates an infinitude of perspectives that can observe and contemplate the world-soul out of which they originate. Each perspective becomes an eternal past that leaves nature continuously enlarged. Objects perish, as we do, in nature’s drive to novelty, but they remain through us a part of natures mind.

In any event there is no concrete individual, no substance or intrinsic essence that persists in spite of change, there is only change and the stabilities that are its manifestations, for change itself, or transition, is imperceptible.

Unreality is not reality mistakenly characterised, for this would assume the possibility of a knowledge and correct characterisation of the real, when it is the categories that are real, whether they are mistakenly characterised or not. A reality correctly characterised is still a mode of categorisation, though one can quibble as to which mode is “more real” than others. Cognition does not merely impose its categories on nature, but expresses the pattern of a nature that is intrinsically categorical.

Basically the real is a feeling and a judgment… The former depends on coherence, the latter on correspondence, but the ultimately real is categorical irrespective of what it corresponds to.

Is a particular more or less real than its antecedents? An object does not exist without the concepts behind it and its supportive physiology. The concept is as real as the object, yet both are mental phenomena. An object is a collection of replications in duration. To which replication of the object do we assign reality? In a given replication, the object is delimited out of memory. Perception is the objectified tip of reminiscence.

(emphasis mine)

To put existence before reality is to avoid a definition of what it means to be real, other than the circularity of to exist is to be real, and to be real is to exist.

The real in feeling and judgment has a personal and impersonal interpretation, but existence cuts across the subject/object boundary.

We think of existence as a pattern of becoming that fills the temporal extent or duration of an entity.

Even if we could demonstrate the neural correlates of an act of cognition, all we would have is the correlates, not the cognition.

One can say, thinking is going on, feeling is going on, perceiving is going on, and then ask, how do ‘I’, how does the self, arise at the foundation of thinking, and how do concepts or objects arise at its terminus.

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PAL. Chapter 9. Autonomy and Compassion. pp.243-274

A coherent theory of value and its impact on moral conduct con only develop on the intrinsic relationality of all objects in the observers mind.

A person in my visual field is an image correlated with brain activity, and an inference based on belief. That is not to say the person does not deserve to be treated as an independent, parallel instance of consciousness. Subjectivism does not imply the non-existence of an external world, only the lack of direct or immediate knowledge of that world. How could the richness of the world be conjured up in my experience were the world itself not its inspiration? This argument, by the way, is as close to a ‘proof’ of an external world as one can get.

We are brains encased in helmets that generate a virtual reality which, by the sole fact of our survival, must conform to what is out there. (!!)

Bonnie’s comments in blue (per permission from GD):

This is where I think JB trips himself up. He makes what I call the Kantian “correspondence theory” fallacy — which has its current form in the correspondence theory of cognition, which basically states that whatever happens in cognition, is somehow completely independent of the objective world, but also somehow there is a one-to-one correspondence to the world. Kant imagined that there were transcendentalia (like the rules of math and logics) that could trans-literate through this type of correspondence, a scientific version of “the world out there” without ever really being able to know the a prior “out there.” 

Here is a little sidebar history to compare and contrast the view(s) that are operating in western philosophy:

On the left we have Humean Idealism, where the world exists out there, forever unknowable. This is carried forward in the philosophy of perspectivalism, where the world exists as a construction of a human collectivity (we-space) – this is the epistemic fallacy that Critical Realism levies against Integral Theory- as Bhaskar notes, wrongly equating “the real world” with “the known world” and gives rise to the many-worlds version when the human collectives exist at different altitudes (different we-spaces, world-spaces, developmental-levels, etc…)

Along comes Kant and ushers in the modern era of scientific rationality based on transcendentalia in the human rational mind:

There is still a gap between the epistemic, known world, and the a prior, real world “out there” – but Kant allows for transcendentalia (and the proper uses of them) to transliterate or modulate scientific versions or maps that correspond to the real world out there (which itself remains unknowable). We learn to manipulate signifiers like mathematical equations, and through experiment and feedback, these signifiers have causal connection to outcomes — but we really do not know why/how the other side of the black box is working, and have no ability to touch the real.

In the above passage of JB, he seems to substitute the transcendentalia with the mocrogenetic wave that somehow “goes out to touch the real” — so this is an improvement, but there is still a gap. There is still a subtle suggestion of the “substance pluralism” problem – how do two substances interface?

Bohm comes along and says, there is only one substance — and its not a substance, its a process — the holomovement — and looks like this:

So the “transcendentally real” is now a different order — more densely enfolded order — of the explicit, object world. This gives rise to the notion that information precedes existence — the higher enfolded orders are higher orders in the informational field. This is better, but Bohm requires an infinite regression of ever-more higher orders of enfoldment– so there has to be structure, before process … which can be problematic, and is somewhat in-elegant, as it speaks to substance monism a la Leibnitz (instead of a process monism).

Given that JB is interested in neuro-cognition, and not metaphysics, he has to settle for his version of the story. But if you extend his process thinking based on process monism (single process, many substances(structures) – then you can come up with a kind of view that sees both cognitive and actual occasions as processes that infold reality — so the real is not an enfolded order, but open, vast, empty of structure or information, and that as it processes (enfolds on itself– like my piece of paper) it creates structures (processural centers) that then go on to generate sub-processes that interfere with other processes, and transforming the whole — into both cognitive and actual occasions.

So this is a process monism version.

 

 

 

 

There is only the substrate “consciousness” which has neither subjective nor objective quality (because those are structurations in the process field). The horizontal levels show different types of structuration, black microgenies are cognitive types, red mocrogenies are actual occasions of various types (structured as R1, R2, R3) — the R series representing the stratification of reality (as Bhaskar says) on an intrinsic (i.e. onto-genetic) scale. When cognitive ocassions interfere with actual ocassions, the processes that inteface become “world” with a subjective and objective pole at different interface points, creating different types of phenomena available  for creating structures at higher levels of order (more and more densely enfolded-

And since each of the interfaces presupposes both an onto-genetic (prior) content, enfolded within each process proceeding from each living center (and attenuating back to source), then the enfoldments get increasingly more dense — and create something that is experienced as a prior (a- priori) layering of information in an implicit field — yet process monism has the advantage of not positing any metaphysical structures …

These illustrations of course, are not meant to be representations of anything “real” in and of themselves, but just useful to give meaning to the languaging of alternative ways of thinking about “reality.”

The real is imputed from the relation to appearance, and appearance is related to some term in addition to the subject.

If feeling is not real, reality is beyond our grasp, since feeling is the experience of process, process is reality and feeling as process is common ground with the process-life of all existence.

All the exists for the observer, and all that can be described with assurance, is given in the present.

We are images or ideas in a whole that is greater than all of us. The superficial (perpetual) bonds we share at the surface of the mental life are ripples in the same pond.

But the way back to the other, for solipsism and egoism, lies in a surrender of autonomy to adaptation, community and wholeness.

The self-realisation of the will can be directed toward any object, an idea, a meal, an illness, but when the will is directed toward another person, given that the other is part of the self, the self is most fully realised.

… genuine compassion is a true feeling of community that arises with a reclamation of other in the relinquishing and renewal of self.

The instinctual basis of genuine compassion suggests an origin antecedent to conscious empathy. This runs deep in the psychic life, even to the subtle pattern in organic nature, a quiet orchestration in which elements in a field are subordinate to the whole, bee hives, termitaries. We see this tacit choreography at work in a flight of birds, a school of fish, even in a grove of palms.

Asked who am I, the person should reply with sincerity, a human being like you. That is the primary identification to which all others – family, origins, religion, state, etc. – are or should be subordinate.

Only when such awareness is palpably entrenched in the psyche, or when we revive the positive in an ‘enlightened’ animism, will a dedication to the greater good of humanity arise out of the sense of being one with living nature.

In susceptible individuals, the perception of suffering elicits personal unhappiness as an empathic residue. In sum the exportation of subjective feeling into an objective state of suffering accentuates a subjective residue of value that leaves behind a trail of affect in the form of pity or compassion. The identification with the other can be attributed to an early phase in the individuation of the affect stream that accompanies a primitive (animistic) mentality.

The inference of pain or suffering, or the compassion for it in others, exports feeling for an into the other in a transit trough the mind of the observer. In compassion, the other’s pain is in fact ones own.

With the assumption of another perspective, or with empathic fusion, especially as an intuition of the commonality of separate individuals, values flow into objects as fluid extensions of the self. One could say that self and other do not achieve full separation and autonomy. An object of compassion is not a piece of flotsam in a sea of indifferent humanity, it is an object of value and signification.

Only in the act of loving does the self love, only in the act of caring is the self compassionate.

Object value or worth does not obligate compassion, but it does underlie whatever compassion is felt. In cases where one recognises a person as worthy but has no interest in his fate, or when a person considers life to be sacred and gives value to the life of others but still does not show compassion when life is endangered, autonomy has proceeded so far that action and feeling are no longer informed by innate empathy. But if one does feel compassion, this feeling can only arise for a person or object felt to have value. All objects have intrinsic value, though some are assigned more worth than others. From the subjective standpoint, compassion arises when the outgoing stream of object-feeling evokes emotions in the self that are congruent with those of the other even before it objectifies.

To feel pity and do nothing is only slightly better than to feel nothing at all. The former is a moral indulgence that is only mildly offensive, while indifference is a severe pathology of character.

Above all, the sense of shared vulnerability evokes an image of a continuum from one mind to another, thus, the primordial unity of subject-object, self and other.

From the standpoint of an individual cognition, empathy and the sense of community are fragmentary glimpses into an unconscious core that makes its way into conscious life. So also, one could say, is the madness of crowds, mob violence and submission to authority.

The identification or fusion of compassion relinquishes the autonomy that has been achieved through a long evolutionary and maturational struggle. The explosion of parts out of wholes in the analytic trend of though gives way to a lapsing of parts back into primordial wholes. The person dissolves in the other and reclaims a wholeness of engagement prior to partition.

To be compassionate, and authentically so, is for self-realisation to actively engage the realisation of the other, to merge self and other as best one can in this world. The mark of the superior soul is the resolution of self and other in conduct sensitive to the potential out of which we all, each moment, arise, undivided by arbitrary boundaries created in the inevitable loss of potential and the continuous vanishing of concrete actualities.

In any symbiosis, the distinction between constituents, and the rivalry of autonomies, is as much delineated as blurred by mutual need, is the slave … less close to selfhood than the master … ?

One is defined by service, the other by need. To the extent the master grows dependent on the slave, he abandons positive selfhood. To the extent the slave resists – or accepts – the conditions of service, to that extent does he find positive selfhood. In humans, selfhood is denied only to those oblivious to circumstance.

Dependency is the need that underlies compassion from the standpoint of the other. Deference to power of wisdom is essential. Those in need must accept the aid (and implicit dominance) of others. The subject who feels compassion may not be aware of this dominance, but that is not true for the person who accepts assistance from another. … Fear and necessity are the handmaids of empathy.

The urge to fight or dominate is not conducive to compassion, which requires a shared sense of vulnerability.

… just as compassion requires that we assume the perspective of the other, so aesthetic perception requires that we assume the perspective of the artist or the artwork.

… it is the self’s own constructs that infuse subjectivity in the work.

Empathy is the revisiting of parts in antecedent wholes, the regression of objects to concepts, individuals to social organisms, a withdrawal to what is deep and abiding from what is transient and accidental.

A critical difference between desire and worth is that desire feels processual and subjective, worth feels objective and substantial.

When the oneness with others is regained, there is no guarantee that individuation will return the parties to their original equilibrium.

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PAL Chapter 4 – Value in mind and nature. pp.127-143

Kill thy activities and still thy faculties if thou wouldst realise this birth in thee. ~ Meister Eckart.

For process theory, the dynamic in a mental content lies in its immediate prehistory, not its causal surface. The change from one state of mind or world to the next ia a novel becoming or near-replication of the immediately preceding state. Images, thoughts, feelings, objects in perception, do not cause something to occur; they appear, disappear ans are replaced by a subsequent state. The present state may be conceived as the effect of its antecedent, but it is a novel actualisation constrained by the state it replaces. In human mentation, the contents of awareness are actualities or finalities that perish, not solids with causal force. The process of actualisation, not what actualises, is the focus of change in mind and world.

In the actualisation process, mind and world are not parallel endpoints. The self is an intermediate phase in the object, which is an objectification of subjective phases in the mind/brain state.

Idealist philosophies regard the contents of the mind and the objects of perception as the phenomenal derivatives of a covert underlying reality. Concepts and objects, however, are not veils concealing formative process; they are the process that deposits them. Whether an object is conceived as real or phenomenal, there is still a development, a microgenesis or phase transition concealed within its surface form. The pattern of the phase-transition within an object is its reality, whether the unconscious process of the mind or the microphysical process of non-cognitive nature. Fundamental to this line of thought is that common process underlies the multiplicity of forms in nature and the diversity of contents sin human cognition.

More than consciousness, value brings the objectivity of the physical world into relation with human emotion and conceptuality.

To say that human valuation is continuous with value in simple physical entities is to claim that value is grounded in the cosmology of process metaphysics, even if the precursors of value in rocks or particles are far removed from their final manifestation in the human mind. In other words, there is no “bottom up” continuum from the intrinsic value of physical entities to the subjective valuations of human cognition.

The concept of intrinsic value traces to an ancient debate in metaphysics centring on the opposition of the qualitative and quantitative modes of analysis. The tensions in these modes of thought is expressed in cognition in the distinction of the qualitative feel of the inner experience and the quantitative science of objects. The feeling of a qualitative something in the mind that is lacking in physical objects is the basis of the dialectic between subject and object, or between inner experience and outer reality. … What a state is, is its objective existence. What a state feels like, is the dynamic within the state. This contrast at a more fundamental level is that of change and persistence, or the extremes of annihilation and eternalism that delimit the Buddhist middle way.

(P.131 has an important paragraph that is too long to share and not reducible to summary in a coherent manner :( )

… the existence of an entity is its intrinsic value.

Intrinsic value as existence transforms to value as feeling, or from existence as a packet of energy to life as a vector of feeling. At the stage of intrinsic value (existence), the dynamic is a non-directional becoming of process within the being of entity. The temporality of the process within the entity, and the spatiality of the category that constitutes the entity, are different perspectives on the becoming and being that are the entity.

… the duration establishes the entity as an existent, while the process over which the duration extends is a kind of vector. In elementary entities, this is an aim to actuality. In the human mind it is, in addition, a direction from self to world.

In brief, value is the being of an entity, or the being (substantiality) of an object, over the becoming of a momentary category of phases. … This way of thinking allows us to unify the temporality of change with the timelessness of category. Quantity arises in the existence of an entity as its duration actualises. Quality arises in the process through which the entity actualises. Similarly, objectivity, as an external perspective on an object, derives from the solidification of its category. Subjectivity , as the internal ‘perspective’ of the object or entity, derives from the change through which the category is laid down. Yet all entities are fundamentally the same, so the distinction turns on the emphasis of either the categorical (substantial) or transitive (processual) aspect of the same entity.

I would locate the subjective at the point where process is no longer isotropic, i.e. when directionality is crucial to a particular existent. At that point, one could say, energy shifts to feeling as the reversibility of intrinsic process becomes untenable.

The presence of feeling imports realness to the phase sequence.

Feeling as realness is the vitality of lower forms that exist in a mode of sensory experience as it makes contact with the environment. Feeling reaches into the sensory organs and promotes movement in a reflex arc. … As feeling transforms to instinct, the circularity of the sensor-motor contact of organism with environment [...] shifts to a unified act-object. The closed circuit of reflex shifts to a simultaneous construct that is the core of a mental representation. For example, when the frog’s tongue captures a fly, perception and action occur as a unit.

Gradually, the response bias of instinct gives way to the potential of drive. The enhancement of antecedent phases of possibility at the expense of the rigid interlocking sensori-motor dependencies of instinct helps to individuate organism and enlarge its affective repertoire. With the drives – aggression, fear, appetite – there are many routes to satisfaction, the fractionation of drive is the threshold of individuality. The subjectivity of the actualising organism is more emphatic as its objective segment, the perceptual world, is articulated by feelings in objects of interest. Inner and outer worlds are the subjective and objective phases of a single perception. … The next stage transforms this pattern to a mature human cognition.

This occurs through an accentuation at a phase previously bypassed in the immediacy of object actualisation where conceptual primitives invested with drive energy allocate feeling to the merging object-concepts that give rise to perceptual objects. In this phase of conceptual feeling, the affective tonality of object-concepts replaces the object-bound drives with the concept-bound desires. The feeling in a concept replaces the feeling in or for an object.

Feeling is like a river that recurs from a source in the mind to a destination in the world, one moment surging up at a proximal phase, another, cascading downstream, yet all the while, an interior dynamic of a larger object, the mind/brain state, that is constantly pouring out objects.

An account of human perception is critical to the so-called observer error in physics, but is also necessary to bring novel insights to physical theory.

Dividing the length of an electron by the speed of light, Whitrow (1972) defined a chronon as the shortest interval of time, 10 to the minus 24 seconds.

(emphasis mine – interesting factoid ^)

The objective segment of a perception is the world we perceive. The subjective segment is the route through which it gets there and the self that perceives it. The self and experiential memories are laid down in the wake of the object as “deep structures” in its actualisation. The mind/brain state is a wave of process that stretches from the core of the mind to the rim of the world.

The ground of existence is augmented in the feeling of realness, which is then allocated to the proximal or distal polarity of the mind/brain state so as to enhance intrinsic value and realness to desire or worth. Desire is an accentuation of the subjective polarity, worth of the objective polarity. Yet, intrinsic value is the basis on which realness and desire develop as the first stages in the conceptual valuation of the object.

Interest is the qualitative shift in value from realness to worth. The conceptual feeling that is channelled into the object heightens its affective content. The object stands out, signifys something beyond itself. An object of desire that has interest or worth can also be a concept or an idea distinct from the desire for it by the self.

The relative emphasis on a proximal-subjective or distal-objective segment in the mental state determines whether valuation will be felt in the perceiver as desire, or in the object as worth.

To sum up; a perception is a transition over phases leading from self to world. A single transition, an act of cognition, is a mind/brain state. An object includes all of the phases in its development. Basic entities also exist as duration. Intrinsic value is the existence of a physical entity over its phases. The intrinsic value of an entity, or a mind/brain state, is its non-cognitive existence. This is the foundation of its initial subjective valuation as realness. Physical entities exist before they are felt as real. They cannot have the feeling of realness without being existents, even if those existents are hallucinatory or virtual. Realness is the accentuation of existence in organism. The object not only exists, but fells real. As intrinsic value grounds realness, so realness grounds a more developed valuation. … The transition os from intrinsic value (existence) of inorganic entities, as the envelope of their waveform, through the realness of organic life, in which process becomes directional, to the conceptual feeling of human cognition, in which desire and worth precipitate as the affective content of abject-concepts at their subjective and objective polarities.

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PAL Foreword,Preface, Introduction pp.0-46

Foreword;

This new book by Jason Brown, who over the last several decades has woven the somewhat unlikely strands of process metaphysics and clinical neurology into a magnificent theoretical tapestry, represents an attempt to include moral thinking within the framework of the theory. The importance of this move should not be overlooked.

How should our beliefs shape our behaviour?

It is a “unified field theory”, rooted in the abstract metaphysics of process philosophy on the one hand, and the messy reality of the neurology clinic on the other, potentially transforming how we look at phenomena as apparently disparate as the nature of time, the origins of dreams ans hallucinations, the way a speech act unfolds, and (now with the present volume) how we make value judgements.

For whom, then, has this book been written? Clinicians are likely to be baffled by the metaphysics; philosophers, by the clinical material; Psychologists and neuropsychologists, by the lack of empirical tests and statistical analysis. Almost all of us will find our resources of knowledge challenged, if not simply inadequate, at one point or another in the reading of Jason Brown’s work. Many faint hearted readers are likely to say, “Well this book seems to have been written for someone else, not for me!”

Brown cannot be rightly accused of oversimplifying or pandering to the needs of a mass audience looking for simple solutions to complex problems. On the contrary, the theoretical edifice here is enormously complex, indeed incomprehensible for those with intellectual blinders firmly in place. There are no slogans here that can be used to stop arguments, but rather a series of insights that constrain our thinking in a different and more productive way than previously. This is of course sometimes a painful process.

Author’s Preface;

Only when a philosophy is at full bloom do we appreciate the intuition that generated it. The early stages of a philosophy is one of groping, confusion, inarticulateness, and enthusiasm. ~ George Adams, 1930.

The clinical and neurological data are the material of the philosophy, while the philosophy is the ground on which the seeds of the psychology can be planted. In my view, a philosophy not based on phenomenal experience is stranded in speculative argumentation, while a psychology not grounded in philosophy or biology will be mired in trivia or romantic fiction. Yet I would agree with the comment of William James that a scientific understanding of the mind/brain will necessarily be metaphysical.

Introduction;

To each she appears in a unique form. She hides amid a thousand names and terms and is always the same. ~ Goethe, On Nature.

Is speciation in the process of evolution analogous to a specification in an act of cognition? Is the process through which species are formed related in some way to the struggle and adaptation that every entity goes through in order to become what it is at any given moment? The realisation of an organism, or any object, is an intrinsic microtemporal process that is largely imperceptible. Does this process correspond with the putative extrinsic relations involved in the reproduction of organisms viewed from the standpoint of populations and evolutionary time? If so, we could say that the evolutionary process of survival and diversification is the outer, large scale, or macroscopic expression of an inner, small scale microscopic process of self-realisation.

The transformation of potential to actual is like that of a not-yet-existent ground to a developing figure in which the ground is the antecedent whole or potential for realisation and the figure is what is actually being realised out of the whole. Once the whole is realised, the being becomes and existent. This process is uniform in nature. The same pattern that creates a brain, brings a particle into existence. (emphasis mine) We should not be surprised that what is most profound in nature is what is most universal, and thus imperceptible owing to it’s uniformity.

One could say that the complexity fills the duration as it expends. This implies that the increasing complexity that eventuates in the human brain is not an explanation of value or consciousness, but is a product of the process leading to it. This process is a kind of growth. This is also true for the transformation of societies, in which change occurs less by revolution or coercion than by slow assimilation, This is also a form of growth, taking place through an increase in the intrinsic complexity of society, viewed as an organism rather than a collection or compilation of entities.

The relation of a duration to it’s contents is not that of a container to the things it contains, but rather that of a virtual whole to virtual parts. In a particle, the whole and part are envelope and wave form; in the mind, they are the mental state and it’s phase transitions. A self, an idea, an object, are recurring sets of covert, sequential phases that unfold over a cycle of existence.

…a becoming creates time (change) as serial parts individuate out of simultaneous wholes. … The relation of category and process, or whole and part to being and becoming is the “deep structure” of the process of evolution.

An entity becomes what it is and so defines itself as it occurs, whether a society in relation to all humanity, or an atom against the void. Every motion is an orientation, every orientation a discrimination, every discrimination a valuation. Existence is the initial value.

Facts or values arise in a context of self-realisation. (emphasis mine)

States of affairs begin as intuitions, then personal beliefs permeated by values, and grow into experiential or scientific facts. The intense value of a fact to one who experiences or discovers it may be of only mild value to someone else. The fact is still a value though it is shorn of personal feelings. Gradually, the affective tonality of a fact becomes so distilled that it seems value free. Scientific facts are like this. Science ignores value in the pursuit of present fact, but in so doing, it also ignores the past that forms much of present desire. We intuit the affective valance in the personal history of novel facts before they wither in habit and consensus , in the passionate intensity of those who argue for their truth. The ferocity of argumentation over seemingly neutral facts is often surprising in those we assume to be detached and reasonable, such as scientists and philosophers.

… The categorical primes that underlie cognition are infused from the very outset with drive energy. Idea and feeling, concept and process, are dual aspects at each phase.

For some, the self is a social construct. Is value a magnet or an impulse? Are customs and obligations determinants of behaviour, sources of instilled values, or bases for moral judgement? Conduct in accordance with the law can arise as personal value, an obligation that is apprehended as partly external, or one that is fully coercive.

This world enriches the self through experience and learning, not by filling a naïve brain with ‘information’, but by fractionating innate categories into sub-sets of knowledge, belief and value.

If one can set aside the traditional assumption that perception occurs through the passive reception and construction of sensory data that are generated outside the perceiver and become ingredient in the mind, many aspects of the theory expounded here will begin to make sense.

The main point here, and the starting point for almost everything that follows, is that fully objective experiences are also subjective, in that they too emanate from the subject’s own beliefs and values. … Subjectivity applies not only to pains, after-images and other qualia, but to all perceptual experience.

The theory expounded in this book is a blend of idealism and naturalism that attempts to resolve the objectivity of ethical strictures in a monist theory of process.

… the existence of the other is, ultimately, an hypothesis about the origins of a perception, just as a perception or a concept is a hypothesis about the entities it models or represents. It is my belief that the problem of subjectivism, far from being obstacles to a theory of subject-object relations, are the key to understanding the nature of value, compassion, and the ‘place’ of the other in the matrix of the self.

With it’s awareness of a no-longer-existing past and a not-yet-existing future, the mind seems fully distinct from physical nature.

Subjectivism, or the “view from inside”, claims we can only know our own ideas. This is not consistent with the hypothesis that each mind realises a portion of the wholeness of universal mind or, put differently, actualises some portion of natural process. In a monist theory of process, a mind is conceived as a duration within a wider category of feeling. Every entity, including a mind, is a local manifestation of the ground of nature or physical reality.

The outcome of this inquiry has been fro me, and I hope it will be for the reader as well, a deeper appreciation of the place of the other in the ‘structure’ of the self’s own valuations.

From an external or objective standpoint, then, moral conduct tends to be judged in terms of what is reasonable or fair, or what conforms to social norms, not in terms of a paradigm of saintly or altruistic behaviour, or what might be considered perfection. … Even charity and hospitality are values that are usually not obligatory, at least not in the West.

For the state, the ideal requires a willingness to transcend national interests for the sake of a globel or transnational perspective, according to which the state pursues the common good, not just that of it’s own citizens.

The higher morality of the individual is centred in the community, not the self, but it is not the community that engages the ideal, it is the individual, or group of like-minded individuals. We can say that the claims of the other should be prior to the claims of the self, as the claims of humanity as a whole should be prior to those of the state, but it is the subjective character of the individual to which all claims of morality must be submitted for judgement.

Time is a critical dimension in moral decision and judgement. This appears in the opposition between automatic or impulsive action and action that is reasoned and deliberate. One occurs in the immediate present, the other involves future considerations. … The more immediate the action, the more it is judged as a sign of character: for example, spontaneous altruism is a mark of virtue precisely because there was apparently not time to make a rational calculation of future benefit.

… we consider the good person to be someone who acts in a good way instinctively, while we consider a good leader or state to be one that acts with caution and deliberation. … Here, the essential point is the importation of time into moral theory.

 

 

by

Sample Journal Entry – Jason Brown

p. xlix

I think the real is pattern in nature that goes unnoticed because it is uniform, while the unreal– the categorical or conceptual– is everything else that is noticed, in mind, and in the objects of perception. The real is not the feeling of realness, which is the affective residue that accompanies the outgoing stream of perception.

What is ultimately real is what exists. A hallucination exists. It corresponds to a brain process. A perceptual object also corresponds to a brain process. The feeling of realness does not necessarily depend on how real the object is or in the correspondence to something in the external world.

p. li

Every act of cognition, every mental state, is a valuation made real. A valuation results from the constraints on drive that shape the desires into the affective tonalities of objects of interest. Realness penetrates intrinsic value and is heightened by interest to worth, which is object-centered valuation. When feeling remains intrapsychic, valuation is centered in the subject as desire.  Every object has an affective quality.

 

p. liv

I did not begin my work as a religious man, nor would I call myself religious today, but when seized with the realization that everything in the mind reflects this pattern, and observing that all things in nature are similarly infused, … all appearing to be outcomes of the same process and driven by the same creative force, how could one fail to be inspired by the unity, the grandeur and the sublimity of it all.